Question

How is the increasingly working from home arrangement due to COVID19 changing how, when, where, and what work is done? What opportunities and challenges face managers and employees?

Answer 1

Around half of the world's population was on a total lockdown while the world witnessed its worst global recession after the Great Recession. This had a great impact on the world of work as well.

Thousands of hundreds of people have lost their jobs in every country affected. Nearly, one million people had applied for employment insurance in Canada. And the people who have their jobs are most working from home. A good proportion of these people also have suffered salary cuts in this time.

For the companies related to the tech field, it is quite easy to just shift their whole workplace to their homes, but the companies who are nit related to the tech field are finding it difficult to cope up with the situation.

People have started getting adjusted with working from home. There are many benefits to working from home like,

• People can get a good work life balance with flexible schedules
• People now don't have the commute stress. Earlier many people spent hours just commuting to workplace, now they can use that time more productively
• It even saves the money of travel or transportation or parking fees or lunch expenses or updating the professional wardrobe
• And study says that 65% of professionals say that they are less burdened and more comfortable now working from home

But people can sometimes find it difficult to work from home all the time for various reasons like, they don't feel the willpower to work or are more lazy at home, difficultly in keeping up with the schedules, boredom and some people find it better when they are able to meet their co workers but now can't due to the current situation.

Thus working from home has completely changed the traditional ways of working and getting the work done. From the point of view of manager, it becomes difficult for them to manage when all the team members are at different places. Managers can also find it hard to have a control over the employees now that they aren't at the workplace. But the positive thing to remember here is that the manager can find new methods or techniques to get the work done from employees. He/she can video call them and assign work, can give them targets to get them to complete the work on time. This gives the manager the opportunity to get the work done via new methods and can also have a realisation that what really matters at the end is the performance.

And about employees, working from home is like a blessing in disguise, because one can do the work at one's own convenience. The employees get the opportunity to do quality work in an environment in which they are the most comfortable in. They get to set their own schedules, their work time and their break times.

Though it has its pros, there are few things that has to be noted. This pattern of working for a long time can cause health and mental distress. Like when a person is accustomed to going to the office and working among the other co workers, when that is completely shut down and he is forced to stay at hone and work for many months straight, that can create mental stress amd signs of depression. And when one spends more time in front of the screen, when workload increases it leads to headaches, backaches, vision problems and other health issues.

Now the situations are improving and few workplaces have even started calling their employees in the office. Even in the future, when all the employees will have to gi back to working in offices, things won't be the same as before. This pandemic has caused long term affects on the working patterns of people.